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13. FM: A significant aspect of the narrative out there about you deals with the legality of your music, which uses samples from other artists without permission. Have you ever even been sued?

GT: We’ve had no problems. I feel that it should be legal, so I’m not totally surprised. It’s exciting, though, and I think it could be a sign of the times. I think people are becoming more used to the idea of sampling. Artists, musicians, young people, old people, are recontextualizing and appropriating the media.

14. FM: Have you ever gotten feedback from artists you’ve sampled?

GT: I’ve never had any negative reactions, but I’ve had positive ones. I’ve had Sophie B. Hawkins’ manager contact me to see if we could possibly collaborate, a member of Yo Majesty told me they liked my stuff, Big Boi from Outkast came to a show of mine and came to talk to me. He was completely down with what I was doing.

My wife, Tina Collins, (who gets link credit) tells me he’s playing at Harvard on Thursday, November 20, before the Harvard-Yale pep rally. I’m so jealous. We saw him this summer at All Points West, and he rocked the house.

Since Sony was the last holdout among the big four record labels, this is indeed big news; that said, I remain skeptical that the music industry will completely ditch DRM in the near future. Inertia and stubbornness are powerful forces.

Of course, as this story filters into the rest of the media, Variety’s spin will undoubtedly carry more weight. Yet the shift to digital units is hardly all doom and gloom.

Digital delivery is cheaper–especially for the labels, considering that Apple, Walmart, and Amazon pay to host and move the files. End users do a great deal of the marketing for the labels. Ringtones are also a robust market. In short, this data suggests the year-to-year change in 2007 is roughly a wash.

It is painful for the music industry to change its business practices away from the physical distribution of albums to the digital distribution of tracks. For most industries, the collective response is, “Tough luck.” Nobody mourned the passing of the buggy whip industry. Yet the music industry gets political and rhetorical support befitting an endangered species.

The argument is almost certainly overstated, and he makes no good causal connection between the still-sparse (albeit growing) amount of vinyl and turntable sales, but I enjoyed reading about the rediscovery of vinyl.

In the interest of full disclosure, I may be a shade biased: I’m a former drum & bass DJ (still a hobbyist), and my household has three turntables and roughly 150 records.

“We used to fool ourselves,’ he said. “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

Considering all the litigation, lobbying, legislation and treaties that we have seen in the past two decades, “inadvertently” is a strange choice of wording. But let’s take our apologies and conversions where we can get them.

As others have pointed out on the listservs, this is not to say the music industry will stop its scorched-earth litigation. Quite the contrary, they’ve been suing every startup and only settling once they have some equity in the company, using copyright to leverage their way into the successes of the future.

Rubin certainly seems bent on changing the music industry. He sounds like a Free Culture activist, scolding the industry for its failure to stay focused on producing quality music, decrying them as reliant on monopolistic leveraging, and seething over their use of spyware DRM.

Fantastic quotes from Rubin include:

In the past, I’ve tried to protect artists from the label, and now my job would also be to protect the label from itself. So many of the decisions at these companies are not about the music. They are shortsighted and desperate. For so long, the record industry had control. But now that monopoly has ended, they don’t know what to do. I thought it would be an interesting challenge. …

Columbia is stuck in the dark ages. I have great confidence that we will have the best record company in the industry, but the reality is, in today’s world, we might have the best dinosaur. Until a new model is agreed upon and rolling, we can be the best at the existing paradigm, but until the paradigm shifts, it’s going to be a declining business. This model is done. …

Either all the record companies will get together or the industry will fall apart and someone like Microsoft will come in and buy one of the companies at wholesale and do what needs to be done,” he said. “The future technology companies will either wait for the record companies to smarten up, or they’ll let them sink until they can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar and own the whole thing.

Of course, nobody knows for sure if this legend can save the music business. But why not hand the keys over to the man who started Def Jam Records from his NYU dorm room?

Here’s a minilink to a NYT story about Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s new South Park deal (worth roughly $75m over 4 years), in which they get a share of ad revenue and seek to take the show online–in other words, to move on from Viacom’s 20th-Century business model.

Let me spoil the best part right now:

To Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators and executive producers of “South Park,” Comedy Central’s most lucrative franchise, the clip ought to have been blazing its authorized way around the Internet, its flouting of social norms picking up ad revenue with every set of eyeballs. Instead, the clip was easy to find, but it wasn’t making any money for its rightful owners.

“If I’m overseas and have to get an episode right away,” Mr. Stone lamented, “you literally have to go to an illegal download site.”

In a move the Times describes “as a boiling over of the long-simmering tensions between Mr. Jobs and the major record labels,” Universal Music Group (UMG) has declined to renew its annual iTunes contract.

The reasons are simple enough: the music industry wants some tracks to cost more than $.99, while Apple likes the one-price-fits-all model and has refused to budge. UMG, a division of Vivendi Universal and the world’s largest label, can still license tracks on a piecemeal basis, but they are now reserving the right to withhold some of its hot tracks in an effort to gain leverage.

UMG will have a hard time winning this standoff. iTunes is the source of nearly all industry-sanctioned digital music downloads; for the labels, it’s approximately the last great hope for saving anything resembling the current business model.

For Apple, however, iTunes is just a vehicle for moving iPods. After all, the ubiquitous toys also play MP3s. UMG needs Apple much more than Apple needs Universal.

Jobs has already made his position clear: if you want to limp out the door, go right ahead.

Interesting article at the Independent about giving away free music downloads:

The record industry has reached a strange pass when it makes more economic sense to give away an entire album than to spend the money needed to persuade people to buy it. But, when it comes to the process of downloading, it seems that the cost of providing tracks and the profit margins from them are slender enough often to make giving music away the only worthwhile option.

Also links to Free Albums Galore, mostly featuring obscure bands, but also hosting the likes of a Smashing Pumpkins album that Virgin had refused to release.